Other Times: Philosophical Perspectives on Past, Present and Future

Current approaches to the question of our position in time—such as those seen in disputes between tensed and tenseless theories, and between realist and anti-realist treatments of past and future—misconstrue the relation between metaphysics and ethics, and the way to characterize the kind of sense which tensed language has. In this original and thought-provoking study, David Cockburn argues that the notion of "reasons for emotion" must have a central place in any account of meaning, and that the present should have no priority in our understanding of tense.